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It took longer than expected, but Trey Parker and company have joined with the growing ranks of the opportunists who distort 9/11 skepticism for fun and profit (unlike the screeds by Alexander Cockburn , Matthew Rothschild and Matt Taibbi , at least the South Park episode had its humorous moments).

They included the obligatory “the Jews did it” canard, and the focus taken was shallow and purposely exploitative. The underlying idea was: “the conspiracy theorists are retarded, because they believe the government was competent enough to pull off 9/11.”

The psychological principle that unifies the distortions of Cockburn, Rothschild, Taibbi and the creators of South Park is avoidance. 9/11 skepticism is an easy target for ridicule, because it includes ridiculous theories (911truth.org is well aware of them , and has cautioned readers to be careful with them). But a commentator can take any attitude he wishes toward these theories. Our attitude has been to largely ignore them, and instead focus on the most striking and disturbing evidence of official complicity in the attacks.

The distortionists make sure to lump together the speculative with the completely ridiculous, and to avoid altogether the ‘elephant in the living room’ of complicity with our with our “enemies”.

The undeniable, indisputable and ugly political reality of our times is that the US intelligence apparatus simply cannot be completely separated from the networks of its supposed enemies. That is the story, and by itself it is cause for impeachment and treason trials for our top officials.… Continue reading →

Abstract: – Many adults in the United States believe the current federal government
has not been completely forthcoming on the issue of the 9/11 terrorist attacks,
according to a poll by the New York Times and CBS News. 53 per cent of respondents
think the Bush administration is hiding something, and 28 per cent believe it
is lying.

Many adults in the United States believe the current federal government has
not been completely forthcoming on the issue of the 9/11 terrorist attacks,
according to a poll by the New York Times and CBS News. 53 per cent of respondents
think the Bush administration is hiding something, and 28 per cent believe it
is lying.

Only 16 per cent of respondents say the government headed by U.S. president
George W. Bush is telling the truth on what it knew prior to the terrorist attacks,
down five points since May 2002.

Al-Qaeda operatives hijacked and crashed four airplanes in the U.S. on Sept.
11, 2001, killing nearly 3,000 people. In October, after Afghanistan’s Taliban
regime refused to hand over al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, the U.S. launched
the war on terrorism.

On Aug. 6, 2001, a Presidential Daily Briefing titled "Bin Laden Determined
to Strike in U.S." mentioned "patterns of suspicious activity in this
country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks,
including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York."

The standing ovation has finally died down, and Steven E. Jones, a soft-spoken physics professor, finds himself pinned against the stage by some of the enthusiastic fans who packed a University of Denver auditorium over the weekend to see him.

A man with a “Got truth?” T-shirt offers Jones a careful explanation for why the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center were operated by remote control. Another quizzes him about the size of the footprint of the Pentagon crash – too small, he says, for the Boeing 757 that “officially” smashed into it on Sept. 11, 2001.

“Can I just shake your hand?” a woman in a baggy red sweater asks Jones. “You’re doing such important work.”

If anything, Jones appears embarrassed by all the attention. Quiet and self-effacing, he’s an unlikely hero for 9/11 conspiracy theorists of every stripe, but that’s exactly what he’s become.

A physicist whose background includes work on nuclear fusion, Jones was put on leave by Brigham Young University in September after publishing a paper saying that the twin towers couldn’t have collapsed solely as a result of the planes that rammed the upper floors on Sept. 11. The paper theorizes that explosives planted inside the building must have been involved and that the buildings’ collapse was essentially a controlled demolition.

Though Jones doesn’t specify who he believes planted the charges, he concedes it would have had to be “an inside job” and likely would have included either very powerful figures on the American scene or entities inside the government.…

It only took six years for Americans to comprehend George Bush and the Republican Party and to realize that the Republicans were not leading America in any promising directions.

Exit polls and interviews with voters across the country by CNN political analyst Bill Schneider show that the November 2006 election was a vote against both Bush and the war in Iraq. Schneider reports that voters did not even know the name of the Democrats for whom they voted. Voters said: “I am going to vote Democrat, because I don’t like Bush, I don’t like the war. I want to make a statement.”

I believe that voters recognized that the peril of one-party rule is that political accountability exists no where except at the ballot box. With the Republican built and programmed electronic voting machines, even accountability at the ballot box was disappearing.

Americans realized that they had made a serious mistake giving power to one party, and they rectified it.

With Republican control of the legislative branch ended, Pentagon Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was immediately swept from power. With the troops, generals, and the service newspapers calling for Rumsfeld’s head, only the delusional warmonger, Vice President Richard Cheney, wanted to keep Rumsfeld in power.

It was a battle that Cheney lost. Cheney’s defeat is an indication that reality has elbowed its way back into Republican consciousness, pushing hubris and delusion away from the control they have exercised over political power.

The lust for unbridled power proved to be too strong a temptation for normally cautious Republicans.…

Editor’s Note:To those of you who already know that we don’t know what happened on 9/11, you’re definitely not alone–our Zogby poll in May found 45% of Americans want a new investigation because we know we were lied to! (Final report here).

Some “retards” believe the strongest evidence for government complicity is the collapse of a THIRD building on 9/11, WTC7, which South Park didn’t show (just like the mainstream media…) Watch it here . We recommend www.wtc7.net for the best information on this.

And as for the whole “retarded” idea of government-sponsored false flag ops, check out 9/11 Precedents .

If we ever find the time, perhaps we should conduct a group analysis of the hit pieces emanating from the intellectual/academic left against the ‘9/11 Truth Movement’. Among other similarities, they each exhibit a noteworthy “dual consciousness.” In a 1997 interview, the great 20th century sociologist Pierre Bourdieu used the phrase to refer to the mindset of media professionals who publicly deny the insidious workings of the invisible structures of corporate broadcasting – masking it even from themselves to an extent; all the while they take advantage of the media tool at their disposal and denounce their critics, claiming they have uncovered nothing which hasn’t been known for ages about the media. . .

Over the years people have become increasingly skeptical of official accounts regarding historic events. After the Kennedy assassination everything changed. It is not so much a question of conspiracy theorists using the smallest margin of doubt to support their theories, but rather the increasing loss in prestige of major institutions, and the effect this has had on their credibility. 9/11 is the perfect example of a historic event whose detailed analysis from several different angles produces conclusions different from the official ones. In Spain, there is skepticism over the Madrid bombings of 3/11; in the U.S. – and in the rest of the world – there is skepticism over 9/11.

This is the belief of Mike Berger, Media Coordinator of 911truth.org, a movement and website whose goal is to seek the truth behind the events we witnessed on our television screens on September 11, 2001. Are there reasons to doubt the official version? Are there solid arguments which lead us to believe there is something hidden amongst the rubble?

The collapse of the towers

In the opinion of Mike Berger, one of the first things to consider is the collapse of the towers: “Before 9/11 no steel-frame skyscraper had EVER collapsed due to fire. And yet on 9/11, 3 WTC buildings collapsed exhibiting many if not all of the signs of controlled demolitions. The physical tests of the WTC steel by UL Labs on behalf of NIST did not fail in less than 2 hours, longer than the towers stood.…

The first thing to say by way of preliminaries (and I’d better get it in quickly before someone suggests that I’ve turned up late or over-weight for a pre-match weighing-in) is that I’m not overjoyed with the pugilistic metaphor of my title.

But some sort of response to the volley of attacks on 9/11 researchers and activists with which the Counterpunch website marked the fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 seems called for.

Michael Keefer strikes just the right tone in responding to Alexander Cockburn’s attempt to banish “conspiracy nuts” from the kingdom of the left.Keefer accounts for Cockburn’s hostility to conspiracy by locating him in the “class of academics and public intellectuals, for whom a migration of power into military, deep-political, and corporate-media hands may…. be difficult to acknowledge.” We’d add that when those intellectuals are wedded to a brand of analysis that cannot satisfactorily account for what they see transpiring before their eyes, that difficulty is only magnified.

Slowly but surely, the academic left is coming to understand that the deep politics paradigm offers the most promising analytic tools for understanding the dynamics of geopolitical struggle. Don’t be surprised by the discomfort associated with the paradigm shift to continue to produce rhetorically overheated, but substantively lacking, complaints like Cockburn’s for quite some time. But really, that’s his problem.

Counterpunch co-editor Alexander Cockburn set the tone of these pieces with an article describing theologian and ethicist David Ray Griffin, the author of The New Pearl Harbor (2004) and of The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions (2005), as a “high priest” of the “conspiracy nuts””whom Cockburn denounces as cultists who “disdain all answers but their own,” who “seize on coincidences and force them into sequences they deem to be logical and significant,” and who “pounce on imagined clues in documents and photos, [“.] contemptuously brush[ing] aside” evidence that contradicts their own “whimsical” treatment of “eyewitness testimony and forensic evidence.”

It’s a characteristically forceful performance, if at times slipshod. One small sign of carelessness may be the manner in which Cockburn slides from calling 9/11 skeptics a “coven” to comparing them, a few sentences later, to “mad Inquisitors” torturing the data (as the old joke goes about economists) until the data confess.” Readers brought up to think that the victims and perpetrators of witch-crazes have not customarily been the same people may find this unintentionally amusing.

Despite the sometimes distinctly nasty tone of this polemic, the idea of exchanging even metaphorical blows with Cockburn and his colleagues is unappealing. The overall quality of the essays that he and Jeffrey St. Clair publish in Counterpunch makes it easy on most days of the week to agree with Out of Bounds Magazine‘s description of it (trumpeted on Counterpunch‘s masthead) as “America’s best political newsletter.” And I’ve admired Cockburn’s own political essays for many years: he’s written movingly, sometimes brilliantly, on a wide range of subjects1 even if his flashes of brilliance sometimes alternate with breathtaking pratfalls: among them his dismissal, as recently as March 2001, of the evidence for global warming; his scoffing, in November 2004, at the rapidly gathering indications that the US presidential election of 2004 had been stolen; and a year later, his mockery of the well-established theory of peak oil and his adherence to the genuinely daft notion that the earth produces limitless quantities of abiotic oil.2 One can forgive a journalist’s slender grasp of the rudiments of scientific understanding. But given his self-appointed role as defender of the progressive left against a horde of fools, It’s dismaying to find him sliding as frequently as he does into positions that seem not just quirky but (dare I say it) unprogressive. Continue reading →

Editor’s Note:
In his latest article, Kevin Ryan exposes Manuel Garcia’s Counterpunch trifecta of articles to reality testing. They fail miserably. Garcia’s explanations for the collapse of the Twin Towers rest on unsupported speculation and scientific jargon rather than facts. Ryan rightly points out that first NIST, and then Garcia, rely on evidentiary uncertainty to draw untenable conclusions rather than consider an hypothesis that is abhorrent to them. This is not surprising, perhaps, given that NIST is government-funded and Garcia is a US weapons scientist.

Garcia’s avoidance of the demolition scenario may also explain his resorting to what Ryan calls “creative guesswork” in attempting to explain the collapse of WTC 7. Whatever the best explanation is for the still-unsatisfactorily explained collapse of WTC 7, Garcia does not advance our understanding in his three-part bit of speculation.

Another Opportunity to Understand Our Predicament

Over the years we’ve heard from a few educated people who claim to understand and support the latest story given by the US government for the unprecedented destruction of the WTC buildings. Unfortunately, those folks usually turn out to either work for the Bush Administration directly, like FEMA and NIST, or are in some other way profiting from the War on Terror. Some people accept what these Bush scientists say because they have PhDs in scientific fields, or because certain media sources promote the official myths. In a way, the curious behavior of these scientists and media sources allows us to better see the predicament we… Continue reading →

Yes, when it comes to Israel and the U.S. press we are familiar with obstructions to raising edgy topics. That’s why we’re glad we have CounterPunch, to welcome good reporters like Ketcham in from the cold.

But more importantly, Christopher Ketcham has put together a phenomenal synthesis of the highly suspicious Israeli intelligence activities in the U.S. on and before 9/11. An enormous network of “art students”, many of whom were located just blocks from the (alleged) 9/11 hijackers; and a small group of five or six Israeli intelligence operatives who were witnessed by many celebrating on a rooftop, with surveillance equipment, very soon after the first plane hit the Trade Center.

Normally, we’d throw caution to the wind, copyright-wise, and reprint an article like this in its entirety, but this particular issue is, thus far, for paying CounterPunch subscribers. We urge you to email or call Counterpunch to see about purchasing this single issue, as it will be a valuable part of any 9/11 library. Meanwhile, we bring you some important chunks.The running of this story shows how, as the tonnage of evidence begins to weigh on people’s minds, the media is creeping into covering the serious 9/11 questions. Many who have publically derided the “truth movement” — like Counterpunch co-editor Alexander Cockburn — now deliver the goods on back roads, or with pretexts that trump their previous diatribes. Had the focus of Christopher… Continue reading →

After the attacks of 9/11, the public was inundated with footage and data on
every channel and in every paper from every country. But was this “coverage” always “information”? Did the media teach us the truth about the real sequence of events and the connections between them, an investigation that would be imperative to our national security? They did not. And nobody except the families of 9/11 wanted to.

Part 1 of this Link TV special hosted by Peter Coyote features 9/11 Press for Truth, a powerful documentary about a small group of grieving families who waged a tenacious battle against those who sought to bury the truth about 9/11. Six of them for the first time the powerful story of how they took on the greatest powers in Washington — and won! — compelling an investigation, only to subsequently watch the 9/11 Commission fail in answering most of their questions.

Join Peter Coyote in discussion with Paul Thompson, author of The Terror Timeline: Year by Year, Day by Day, Minute by Minute: A Comprehensive Chronicle of the Road to 9/11, the catalyst for the film. Adapting Paul Thompson’s work, the filmmakers collaborated with documentary veterans Globalvision to stitch together rare overlooked news clips, buried stories, and government press conferences, revealing a pattern of official lies, deception… Continue reading →

September 11 conspiracies will go mainstream on Sunday as BBC
airs an hour long documentary (article below) that investigates the growing
number of conspiracy theories surrounding the 9/11 attacks.

9/11: The Conspiracy Files, will try to answer the question that has
been doing the rounds on the Internet ever since the hijacked planes crashed
into the twin towers of the World Trade Center: “Is it an inside job?”

According to the BBC, investigators have travelled across the United States
speaking to eyewitnesses trying to separate fact from fiction.

The programme produced by Guy Smith raises another important question: “Why
was America so unprepared when terror attack warnings had been received?”

According to a Scripps Howard poll, 36% of 1,010 Americans believe that the
government is responsible for the attacks either by omission or by commission.

The official 9/11 commission report concluded that “there were specific
points of vulnerability in the plot and opportunities to disrupt it.

“The outrage caused by September 11th allowed the present administration
to instantly implement policies its members have long supported, but which were
otherwise infeasible,” according to the main conspiracy website, 911Truth.org,
which receives thousands of visitors every day. “9/11 was exploited to
launch an open-ended, perpetual “war on terror,” actually a war against
any and all enemies the US government may designate. The case of Iraq shows
that the target countries of this war need have nothing whatsoever to do with
9/11.”

BBC World News started reporting that 7 World Trade Center had collapsed about 23 minutes before the building actually came down, as video of the news network’s live broadcast on September 11th shows.

Editor’s Note:
BBC World News announced WTC 7 had collapsed, well in advance of the actual event. Discovery by blogger prompts controversy. Angered counter-attack from BBC avoids issue: What was the source of the information? New 3-minute video compilation of the key points from the BBC broadcast, demonstrating foreknowledge of WTC 7 collapse. Read more for complete coverage of the last three days.

The skyscraper also known as the Salomon Brothers Building was still standing and clearly visible over the shoulder of a BBC reporter in New York, even as the network provided accurate, past- tense details of its collapse. Jane Standley’s live report was interrupted about five minutes before WTC 7 actually came down at 5:20pm EDT. A video clip establishing this anomaly was discovered on the archive.org news service and first pointed out to the public Monday by the blog writer 911veritas at 911blogger.com .

The ensuing controversy has prompted a swift, unusually angry response from the BBC, which however has failed to address the substantive issue: Apparently the network’s personnel were unfamiliar with WTC 7, which is excusable. They were however reporting information culled from a source with advance knowledge of the building’s collapse. Who was that source?

The answer may be essential to settling the long-standing dispute over… Continue reading →

[12.03.07] Alexander Cockburn’s “US: The Conspiracy That Wasn’t,” which is an attack on the 9/11 truth movement, is faulty in virtually every respect. He calls me one of the movement’s “high priests,” as if it were a religious movement, rather than a fact-based movement that involves scientists, engineers, pilots, war veterans, politicians, philosophers, former air traffic controllers, former defense ministers, and former CIA analysts. 1 by Dr. David Ray Griffin March 12, 2007

He calls us “conspiracists,” ignoring the fact that in defending the government’s account, he is defending the original 9/11 conspiracy theory. In claiming that the Bush administration and the military are too incompetent to have organized the 9/11 attacks, he gives an argument that could equally well be used to prove that they could not have organized the military assaults on Afghanistan and Iraq.

In claiming that bin Laden took credit for the attacks, Cockburn appears not to be aware that in the video on which this claim is primarily based, the man playing Osama bin Laden is heavier and darker than the bin Laden of all undoubtedly authentic videos, 2 or that the FBI’s “Most Wanted Terrorist” page on bin Laden does not mention 9/11—because, an FBI spokesman explained, “the FBI has no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11.” 3

Although Cockburn says that members of our movement are “immune to reality check,” he endorses the official theory… Continue reading →

A year ago, the polling group Zogby asked Americans whether the government is “covering up” the true events of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Forty-two percent said yes.

Movies challenging the official version of events can be found all over the Internet. One of them, “9/11: Press for Truth,” will play this weekend at the Guild Cinema in Nob Hill. The film adapts the exhaustive 9/11 timeline assembled by Paul Thompson, a graduate of Stanford University. It also talks to victims’ relatives who have been at odds with the Bush administration.

Colin Donoghue, a recent political science graduate from the University of New Mexico, pushed for the screening in Albuquerque.

Donoghue said he didn’t get interested in the theories that challenge the official reports until about a year ago.

“Initially, I didn’t think that much about the official story,” he said. “In fact, a friend of mine at the time (of the attacks) said he thought George Bush was in on it. I kind of rolled my eyes at him. I didn’t think there was anything to it.”

Then he read David Ray Griffin’s “The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11″ and Griffin’s follow-up, “The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions.”

“I became concerned that the official story didn’t hold up to the facts,” Donoghue said.

Government detractors suggest the media have failed to adequately report information that contradicts the official version of events, including:

The View, a talk show featuring four women with a variety of backgrounds and ideologies, is produced by and often features appearances by Barbara Walters. In May 2001, the co-hosts were awarded the Safe Horizon Champion Award for their continued efforts to raise awareness on issues of importance to girls and women. In March 2002, The View received the Linda Dano Heart Award from Heartshare Human Services of New York for its programming philosophy that brought enlightenment, entertainment and comfort to families throughout the nation and New York in the wake of September 11, 2001. As a result, the show boasts 30 million viewers, received the 2003 Daytime Emmy® Award for ‘Outstanding Talk Show,’ and other Daytime Emmy® Awards.

In her history as host of The View, Rosie O’Donnell has brought important and difficult-to-discuss issues to the table, such as depression and autism. Long ago she established “Rosie’s For All Kids Foundation,” which has raised more than $56 million and awarded more than $22 million in grants to over 1,400 child-related non-profit organizations to benefit low income families across the country since its inception.

Addressing the need for truth and transparency in US government and media is thus in keeping with Rosie’s long history of grappling with important issues on The View.

A bit of background–What is The View, and who is Rosie O’Donnell? (And what’s the big deal, anyway?) In the last few weeks, Rosie O’Donnell, host of ABC’s popular morning talk show ”… Continue reading →